SYF GAMING

PC Gamers are lucky when it comes to hardware and components. We get the option of running a fully customised experience and setup – hand selecting components and equipment to get things just how we want it. For a lot of us, gaming is a hobby - something that we’re happy to spend time and effort on – but it’s also something many of us don’t want to break the bank on. Budgets of all shapes and sizes exist, whether you’re a youngster looking to craft your first build – to and expert who’s done it a hundred times over. The market provides a broad selection of high end, mid-range, and low end components to suit your needs.

Design & Hardware:

A new addition to the mid-range graphics card is the MSI Radeon R9 270X Gaming. With its gaming series of hardware, MSI decks out the R9 270X with a slick infusion of jet black and red that conceals a modest performance for a card priced at AU$289. It’s a great look that’ll turn heads and stand out from the crowd. The inclusion of two massive TwinFrozr 10cm fans along the top of the card is rather prominent on first sight - however you’ll quickly grow to adore them for the fantastic cooling they provide – more on that later. Flipping the card over onto its face reveals a wide array of the usual ports, including a 6-Pin Power connector, 1x HDMI 1.4a, 1x DisplayPort and 1xDVI-D and DVI-I ports. You also have one CrossFire connector allowing you to simultaneously run two R9 270X cards for even faster graphical performance. The card dimensions sit on the larger side at 256x127x34mm with a dual slot width, and weighs 550g – so you’ll comfortably fit this into any full or mid tower case.

For a gamer, performance comes first. You’re looking for that peak frame-rate as you enter battle – and a system with stability that’s not going to crash to the ground when the action picks up. In the past the mantra has usually been the ‘bigger is better’ approach in hardware. But what happens if you attend regular LAN’s with your team and friends? Having to chug a monster of a system around isn’t always fun – and certainly isn’t great if you’re tight on space. Enter the MSI Z87M GAMING motherboard, a tiny, micro ATX motherboard that on-paper doesn’t seem to cut down on features. So how does it stack up? Have the folks over at MSI finally broken the mould that bigger isn’t always better?

Design and hardware:

Lifting the MSI Z87M GAMING out of its box is a stunning moment. You get to marvel at the ferocious red and black design work that MSI crafts into their GAMING Series of hardware, and revel in the fact that this little tiger is going to pack a punch. The first thing your eyes will fall upon is the dragon face heatspreads – simply put, they look awesome. Across from which is the encircled Intel LGA 1150 CPU socket. The heatspreads lay low – what’s smart about this is the intelligent and calculated spacing for almost any moderate to large aftermarket CPU cooler. Moving further over are four RAM slots - they’re single clip in design which saves space and helps reduce potentially finicky installations. Unless you’re rough and careless with your hardware you shouldn’t be running into any troubles with the single sided clips. A small thing to note is that the slots aren’t colour coded - however I particularly like this as it fits in with the jet black finish of the board. Moving southerly on the board we have the expansion slots – due to the smaller size it’s only a given that you’re not going to find an insane number of PCI-Express 3.0 slots. In saying this, however, the Z87M GAMING manages to fit in two of them – a rather incredible accomplishment, enabling multi-GPU setups to become a reality on a board of this minute size. Just because the board is physically small, doesn’t mean MSI’s engineers and design team have gotten lazy – in-fact it seems to have motivated them to rise to the new challenge. Gold plated audio jacks, and even a PS/2 keyboard and mouse port for zero input latency and n-key rollover – this attention to detail is the stuff you’d expect on a top of the range motherboard but it’s here in full force on the Z87M GAMING. This is a beautifully nifty package – all tied together in one small form factor.

SYF GAMING DOTA 2 Cup Finals supported by MSi and Tt eSports will take place this Sunday 17th November.

This Finals will be casted bySYF GAMING [TV]The Finals includes the top 12 teams from the group stage, All teams are expected to be present in the in-game group chat (SYFCUP) at the starting time,password for lobbies are also SYFCUP. If any team is 20 minutes late to their starting time your team will forfeit a map. Results are expected to be submitted in thisthread(link will be posted tomorrow).

Good luck to all the teams that qualified for the finals! This information will also be emailed out to each of the 12 teams directly.

Sunday 17th November: 12pm AEDT - 9pm AEDT All group games.

Round 1: Best Of 1Round 2: Best Of 3Semi Finals: Best Of 3Grand Finals: Best Of 5

This document is written in response to allegations of Bracket Fixing by SYF GAMING from members of the Australian Dota 2 Community, and indicates the process followed in creating the group stages and the finals bracket.